


Harm

by breathtaken



Category: The Musketeers (2014)
Genre: BDSM, Beating, Canon Era, Community: bbcmusketeerskink, F/M, Non-Sexual Kink, Painplay, Sub!Athos
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-12
Updated: 2014-05-12
Packaged: 2018-01-24 12:32:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,550
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1605317
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/breathtaken/pseuds/breathtaken
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>She's never been so intimate with a man other than her husband, but he doesn't seem like a man to her now. A shade of a man, perhaps; something that only exists in the night.</i>
</p><p>
  <i>As she holds his head to her shoulder and his tears dampen her dress, she finds she feels nothing for him – which is strange, because the other Constance feels too deeply, cares too much about good men who are stupid and reckless and self-destructive, and not her concern.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Harm

**Author's Note:**

> Originally for [this](http://bbcmusketeerskink.dreamwidth.org/774.html?thread=5894) kink meme prompt, though this is something of a reworking.
> 
> Set pre-show up to Episode 1x01.
> 
> Content warnings: elements of dehumanisation (not sexualised), and a generally unhealthy approach to kink.
> 
> I'm indebted to [sevenswells](http://archiveofourown.org/users/sevenswells) for her comments.

She knows it's gone too far when she realises she's become several different women.

The first Constance is her public face (cheerful, caring, a loving wife); though it's difficult to say whether that's her true self, or just who she'd like to be. But when he sends for her, when she puts on her travelling cloak and slips out into the Paris night, she sheds that woman and becomes someone else entirely.

Someone she doesn't quite recognise.

She couldn't say for certain if he's made her this way, or if he's tapped into a cruelty that's lain dormant all her life. If cruelty is even the right word.

She would tell herself she does it because he needs her to; but she doesn't, because she doesn't think of it. This Constance doesn't think at all, only reacts, is as practiced with whip and crop as another fragile, secret part of her longs to be with sword and pistol.

When he strips off his shirt in front of her for the first time, there are already whip scars on his back – old scars, though she knows he's not long been a soldier. Her husband is away that night, and she has no lodger, so she tells him to kneel on her kitchen floor and hits him with her carpet beater until he's crying and shaking, before taking him in her arms.

She's never been so intimate with a man other than her husband, but he doesn't seem like a man to her now. A shade of a man, perhaps; something that only exists in the night.

As she holds his head to her shoulder and his tears dampen her dress, she finds she feels nothing for him – which is strange, because the other Constance feels too deeply, cares too much about good men who are stupid and reckless and self-destructive, and not her concern.

But neither of them are real tonight, and he means nothing in her arms.

When he comes to her door again, a week later, she almost shuts it in his face; but remembers just in time her cold, empty hearth, the chickens that need feeding, the washing still to bring in – and steps back to let him enter, without a word.

This time he doesn't cry, just murmurs something she doesn't catch, the same pattern of sounds over and over like a prayer.

The third time, he asks her to tell him he's worthless, a failure; and she forgets who she is for a second, another Constance slipping through the cracks.

"I won't," she replies shortly, dropping the riding crop on his bed as though she suddenly can't bear to hold it.

"May I ask why not?"

She sizes him up: drunk as usual, bloodshot eyes, but an authority in his voice that's new to her, as if he's used to being obeyed.

She finds she likes him even less when she's confronted with a person, with a will of his own.

"I don't like to say it because I don't believe it, monsieur."

He sighs. "You might as well, because I believe it whether you say it or not."

He says it so matter-of-factly, only a hint of something tired and downtrodden in his voice, that she suddenly doesn't want to know any more.

She slaps him, spits in his face and says how dare he talk back to her, didn't he ask for this, and feels better for it.

She goes further in the end: tells him he is nothing, that he doesn't matter, that he might as well not exist.

As far as she's concerned, that last part's true. She knows his name, of course, and his occupation, but they have never had a real conversation with each other. She's never seen him in the light, has never known him outside of their rooms and the woman he's made her, and sleeps easier for it.

Slowly, over the weeks, she becomes more creative, more direct. Willing to touch, keeping less and less distance. She uses clothes pegs on him, scratches and pinches, digs her carefully-sharpened nails into the sensitive folds of his skin. There's that strange little silver trinket she has that he told her feels like scores of needles pricking him.

She ties the ropes the way he's taught her, spread-eagling him across his bed so he cannot flinch or squirm away.

Sometimes she says, "Enough," before he's done, knowing that his back and buttocks and legs probably can't take anything more, and even the agonising sting of the brine she dabs onto his wounds is not enough to take him to the place he seeks inside himself.

Those times, he does not cling to her afterwards but wraps his arms around his own legs, rolling up into a foetal position on the bed, as if he could revert to that primal state, before consciousness.

It's ironic, really, she would think, if she thought of it (which she still does not): that what she does to him seems to help him keep a grip on his humanity. A kind of serenity, certainly; the last few times she's seen a peace in him that she's not sure she likes.

She dreams one night that she's drinking his darkness in, drawing it out of his throat and through his mouth, swallowing it down.

Only once does he tell her, afterwards, that they should stop. That _she_ shouldn't be doing this, as if he had never asked her for it.

"If I didn't want to, I wouldn't," she replies coldly, though it's not a question of _wanting_ – or at least, not of wanting this.

She thinks again of the kitchen floor that needs scrubbing, the alcove by the front door where her husband's boots should stand; and kicks him in the stomach for his pains.

Then d'Artagnan bursts into her life without warning, unwittingly dragging the two of them out into the light; and the next time she gets his summons, she throws it on the fire before staggering outside, sliding down the garden wall as a strange animal noise rises up from her throat, crying until she half-fears it will drown her.

When she finally comes to, she's exhausted; all her grief drained away. But as she gazes toward the heavens, smelling the flowers and the night air as if for the first time, it also feels like a shade has fallen from her eyes – that she's of the world again, in a way she hasn't been for months.

What has she _done_?

She has no words for it; no name she can give it, no context.

Athos – his name still strange – has been naked before her, but that's the only relation it bore to lovemaking. He's certainly never asked her for anything like that, nor has she felt he wanted it.

She'd wanted to help, that first night at least; she knows that much. Right up until the moment he knelt for her.

It was then she stopped knowing herself.

"Constance! Constance, what's wrong?"

She turns her head, and d'Artagnan is right there all of a sudden, hands reaching out to grip her shoulders, looking worried – at the sight of her, she supposes.

She tries to speak, and realises she's still crying and she can't breathe through her nose, and her voice catches in her throat.

"Is it Athos?"

She nods numbly, heart suddenly lurching, terrified that d'Artagnan can read everything that's happened in her face.

"No, it's okay – we saved him, remember? He's going to be fine," d'Artagnan says reassuringly, tucking a lock of hair behind her ear; and she remembers belatedly that Athos has just escaped being put to death.

And she'd dropped everything to try and save his life; yet she can't believe that she did it for him at all.

For d'Artagnan, then, for his grief, his search for the truth?

Or for herself? A chance to do something with her life, for it to mean something?

Something other than this.

"Come inside, and I'll get you a drink," d'Artagnan continues, pulling her to her feet – and she stumbles, but steadies herself against his arms. "You'll catch your death out here."

She allows herself to be ushered inside and sat down at the kitchen table while d'Artagnan opens a bottle, lets him press her hand and tell her all about how Athos is okay now, he's doing well, their evidence was enough, feeling the alcohol warm her chilled skin from the inside out, and wondering what d'Artagnan would say if he knew.

He's young, lively, handsome… if she weren't married already, she could easily care for him. And she knows he would never understand what she did.

She thinks again of the other night, laying siege to a company of soldiers in a whore's clothing, with a pistol in her hand. Of taking a life, and saving another. Of being a part of something greater than she'd ever dared hope.

Was that what she'd wanted all along? Just to do something that mattered?

There are no easy answers, of course, but she knows that what she's done ends here, with d'Artagnan at her table and the aftertaste of wine on her tongue; and she could swear she feels the exact moment that something new begins.

Something for her, this time.


End file.
